Thoughts on Money

The world is split between those who don't know how to start making money and those who don't know when to stop.

But consumption smoothing pays homage to an existential reality: Life itself is the ultimate scarce asset. The future is unknowable, and religiously maintaining a double-digit savings rate through the worst squalls of life is not of the utmost importance.

Risk isn’t a measure of negative consequences. It’s a measure of uncertainty. And the issue with minimizing risk is that while we protect our downside, we prevent ourselves from achieving any sort of meaningful upside. In this way, risk minimization isn’t an insurance policy as much as it is a collar, and the cost of protecting our downside is the... See more

I work with the wealthy, the children of the wealthy and the soon to be wealthy. Please listen to what I have to say. I know you think that if you can just make enough money, your problems will go away. And there will be harmony in your household. And your relationships will be better.Unfortunately, that that’s not how it works. What actually... See more

“conventional budgeting methods rely on restriction, discipline, and perfectionism in a way that doesn’t work for people. They ignore an important truth about money: it’s meant to be spent.”

But here’s the key: Money work isn’t about getting rid of our uncomfortable emotions. It’s about learning to respond to them, to work with them, and to learn from them.

And most importantly, to not let them steer you in directions that will make life harder for you.

Neither he nor the others feel that the hunched shoulders and housing insecurity of their youth were good for their art. The “La Bohème” portrait of impoverished painters and poets was after all a description, not a prescription. “And at least they could afford the garret,” Jacobs-Jenkins says. “In New York, forget it.”